The Eighties

Live, From Tribeca!

A neon-lit promise of excitement on Tribeca’s then dark streets, the Odeon was the restaurant that defined New York’s 80s: a retro haven for the likes of Warhol and Basquiat, De Niro and Belushi, with a cocaine-fueled scene captured in Bright Lights, Big City. In an oral history inspired by the Odeon’s 25th anniversary, staffers and such habitués as Tom Wolfe, Lorne Michaels, and Jay McInerney share their table-hopping, fistfighting memories.

In Lower Manhattan, at the corner of West Broadway and Thomas Street, hangs a restaurant sign that functions as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Composed not of abstract shapes but of 29-inch-high stylishly retro letters that spell the words cafeteria and the odeon in reddish-orange neon, the sign represents different things to different people. For some, it is an Edward Hopper painting come to life. Others recognize it as an image from the opening credits of vintage Saturday Night Live reruns or the cover of Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City. Others see it simply as a restaurant sign.

But for some who lived in Manhattan as the 1970s gave way to the 80s, the Odeon sign was a homing beacon that signaled a new chapter in New York’s nightlife. Indeed, by the time the Odeon opened in the fall of 1980, Studio 54, that sybaritic symbol of the previous decade, had already begun to recede along with the financial crisis that had fueled the disco’s anything-goes atmosphere. Shirts would soon be buttoned to the neck instead of opened to the navel. The once untamable city was acquiring a crust of civilization, order, and even romance. Prosperity and opportunity had returned—and the city’s nightlife would begin to reflect that.

And what better place to showcase this new sensibility than the wilds of Tribeca, a former commercial section of Manhattan below Canal Street that, while it featured street after cobblestone street of striking cast-iron buildings, became spookily barren at night, save for the inviting glow of the Odeon’s neon.

Through the doors was a movie set doubling as a restaurant, an uncharacteristically wide space of buttery light, ribbed glass, and burnished wood that recalled both Paris’s La Coupole and Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, albeit with a Bakelite frieze of New York’s skyline on the wall. A carefully chosen mix of old standards and New Wave played on the sound system, anything from Ella Fitzgerald and Georgie Fame to the Shangri-Las and Talking Heads.

The Odeon looked cool but exuded warmth, which is not a sentiment associated with the 80s, a decade best remembered for the three *C’*s—not Clemente, Chia, and Cucchi, but cash, cynicism, and cocaine, as well as that holdover from the 70s, casual sex. The perspectives of writers, artists, gallery owners, waiters, and cooks who ushered in the era at the Odeon tend to be rosier. Yes, they admit, drugs and sex could be had there, particularly if one knew about the storage closet beneath the stairs, but those commodities were everywhere in New York. What made the Odeon special, they say, is that, in the formative years of the decade, it became a clubhouse where the young men and women who would determine the direction of the culture—high and low—for at least the next 10 years came to network, flirt, and occasionally fight. aids, moneygrubbing, and the ravages of prolonged drug use—not to mention age, the usual suspect—would soon sober up the crowd, but for a few euphoric years there were rules to be rewritten and reputations to be made.

And that included the reputations of the young trio who had opened the Odeon: the London-born Keith McNally, his older brother Brian, and a fresh-faced transplant from Streator, Illinois, named Lynn Wagenknecht, who would eventually marry, and later divorce, Keith.

The McNallys are the restaurant world’s rough equivalent of rock ’n’ roll’s volatile Davies brothers, Ray and Dave, though, truthfully, their band, the Kinks, stayed together longer. But in this analogy, it’s the younger Keith who resembles the elder Ray, the Kinks’ leader and pre-eminent songwriter. A former actor who co-starred in playwright and Beyond the Fringe member Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, Keith is the obsessive, tortured visionary with sad eyes, a melancholy streak, and a cutting sense of humor. Brian is more the Dave Davies type: a well-read devil-may-care battler with keen social instincts and a load of charisma.

To this equation, Wagenknecht brought can-do American ingenuity and a midwestern work ethic that could cut through the Stilton when things got a little too British. People who know her tend to mention her modesty. “She’s the quiet Beatle,” says filmmaker Amos Poe, an Odeon regular, using yet another rock ’n’ roll metaphor.

Prior to the Odeon, the three partners worked together at the restaurant One Fifth, named for its location at 1 Fifth Avenue. Owned by a man named George Schwarz, who also happened to be the head of radiation oncology at a Manhattan hospital, One Fifth was a proto-Odeon in terms of the crowd it drew, though campier in spirit and décor. Designed by Schwarz’s late wife, the Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik, the restaurant was outfitted with chairs and other accoutrements from the Cunard cruise ship R.M.S. Caronia. The maître d’ wore tails and, Schwarz says, a monocle, and the restaurant attracted the art and Saturday Night Live crowds that would soon be flocking to the Odeon. Keith McNally had landed there first, in 1976, working his way up from oyster shucker to waiter to general manager in the dining room. Eventually, he hired Brian, who tended bar, and Wagenknecht, who became a waiter, and, subsequently, Keith’s girlfriend.

In 1979 a trip to Paris convinced Keith and Lynn that New York lacked a worthy brasserie. By spring 1980 they had found the space: the site of the old Towers Cafeteria, at 145 West Broadway, a steam-table restaurant that had been in operation since the 1930s. Located immediately south of SoHo—which would soon begin its metamorphosis from art-world enclave to chic shopping mecca—Tribeca, as it had been nicknamed since the 60s, was the province mostly of intrepid artists attracted to cheap loft space. On May 30, 1980, with Brian on board as well, the partners, under the name Orwell Restaurant Associates, Ltd., signed a 15-year lease for the Towers site.

The décor fell to Keith and Lynn, who say it wasn’t so much what they added to the space as what they took away. They kept the hanging globe lanterns, terrazzo floor, tiled bathrooms, and Takacheck dispenser, replacing the utilitarian meal tickets with promotional ones bearing the Odeon’s Art Deco logo. Brian came up with the name, which he says was inspired by London’s Odeon cinema chain. Behind garish Formica panels, the trio discovered handsome wood paneling, which the McNally brothers refinished themselves. In New Jersey they found a man who could render the restaurant’s new name in neon letters that matched the cafeteria section. Wagenknecht hung the sign. They added the Bakelite skyline, which had once adorned a Woolworth’s, and a curvaceous, mirrored 1930s Deco bar. The latter fixture, their biggest expenditure, cost $11,750, almost 10 percent of the $140,000 opening budget. To complement their movie-set-cum-dining-room, they hired 24-year-old Patrick Clark, a rising-star chef who turned out to be as melodramatic as he was talented. A man of considerable heft, Clark, the black, Brooklyn-born son of a cook, had studied in France under nouvelle cuisine pioneer Michel Guérard. To the Odeon he brought sole stuffed with salmon mousse and sauced with vermouth, and a working style liberally garnished with fits of pique.

The Odeon was christened on October 14, 1980, with a party, the details of which no one seems to remember, except that it was a lot of fun. Within weeks, the restaurant had become the latest in a long line to attract a stylish, creative crowd. But what distinguished the Odeon was its postmodern interpretation of what constituted a memorable dining experience, circa 1980. “They hit the Zeitgeist with the architecture,” says Joe Helman, an art dealer who was instrumental in making the Odeon a popular place to fête an artist in the 80s. “The Odeon was kind of retro, without being kitsch. It was one of the places that really defined the moment.” Self-conscious without being pretentious—which couldn’t always be said of its customers—the Odeon’s design, its flattering lighting and aesthetically pleasing staff appealed to a younger, more cosmopolitan generation’s love of the cinematic, and its preoccupation with looking good.

The menu, meanwhile, appealed to a broader palette of tastes. Like the French restaurants that, since the 40s, had set the standards for fine dining in New York, the Odeon offered ambitious, fashionable food and wine, along with crisp service. But for the formal and often intimidating stuffiness of those restaurants it substituted the boozier, more casual and convivial atmospherics found at the formidable Elaine’s, where the literary and show-business crowds still go, and at Mickey Ruskin’s many art and music hangouts, most notably Max’s Kansas City, inner sanctum of Andy Warhol and his Factory entourage in the 60s. And though the Odeon’s prices were geared for successful artists, not starving ones, those with more modest means and tastes—and those who couldn’t care less about the pedigree of their pea shoots—could always find a burger or a country salad on the menu.

“For me, the Odeon defined downtown,” says Lorne Michaels, executive producer of S.N.L. and a friend of Keith’s. “Whoever you were, you felt instantly comfortable in that space. It had sophistication and it had French fries.”

This October the Odeon celebrates its 25th anniversary. Much has changed since the restaurant opened its doors. The partners have gone on to produce some of the most successful and influential restaurants of the last 25 years, although not in concert. Brian left the Odeon in 1982 to move to Paris with his wife, Anne (who works for this magazine; the couple are now divorced). He returned in 1983, and soon opened a series of restaurants on his own—Indochine, Canal Bar, and 150 Wooster—that set and raised the bar of hipness in New York. Around the same time, he and Keith became embroiled in an on-again, off-again feud which has had its physical moments. Theories about its origins abound, but the brothers decline to discuss it. Currently, they are not on speaking terms.

In 1983, Lynn and Keith also began to expand, opening another stylish brasserie, Café Luxembourg, on the Upper West Side, followed in 1986 by Nell’s, on West 14th Street, and in 1989 by Lucky Strike, on Grand Street in SoHo. Simultaneously, they raised a family of three children and Keith wrote and directed his first film, End of the Night, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. In 1990 the couple moved to Paris, where Keith made a second film, Lynn returned to painting and managing their portfolio of restaurants by fax, and their marriage ran aground.

Shortly thereafter, Lynn bought out Keith’s stake in the Odeon, as well as in Luxembourg and Nell’s. Keith kept Lucky Strike and, beginning in 1996, opened a series of art-directed bars and restaurants: Pravda, Balthazar, Pastis, and Schiller’s Liquor Bar. His latest, an Italian restaurant in the Village currently called Bar Silvino (not to be confused—perhaps—with the well-established Da Silvano), is scheduled to open next spring. All are jam-packed. All carry strands of Odeon’s DNA, as do dozens of restaurants around town with which he, Lynn, and Brian have nothing to do.

The original, the Odeon, meanwhile, has had its ups and downs. But the restaurant was re-discovered in the mid-90s and the crowds are still strong. “It started out white-hot and transitioned into a classic,” says Amos Poe. “It’s as if Pamela Anderson became Greta Garbo.”

Brian McNally: [While we were still working on the interior] I remember [poet and Warhol superstar] Taylor Mead walking by. He came in and said: “That’s gorgeous! Nobody will come.” And he ran out. And we didn’t see him until it opened. It was so depressing. We had people coming down and trying to be optimistic about it, but clearly not believing that we were going to do business at all.

Keith McNally: The first night wasn’t a disaster, but the first customer was. She entered the second the doors opened [around six p.m.] without a clue it was a new restaurant. Alone in the dining room, she waited 90 minutes for a green-bean salad before being told we’d run out of green beans. Fuming, she ordered just a coffee and nothing else. She got the nothing else rather quickly, but the coffee never arrived. No one knew how to operate the coffee grinder.

Brian McNally: I don’t want to be a snob about it, but people didn’t “get it” in the way that everybody “gets it” now. You know, everybody is hip today. As soon as you open a restaurant, they come pouring in. At that point we’d get people walking in—uptown people or people from, you know, outside of New York—and they’d say, “This is not a restaurant.” They didn’t get it, but the artists did.

Amos Poe, filmmaker (The Blank Generation, Alphabet City): Word got out that there’s this restaurant in Tribeca that was packed. It was like, What? You take your life in your hands walking down those streets. There were practically no lights. And then there was this bright corner, where there was this sign the odeon. There was nothing to take away from the glitter of that sign. That sign was just so “Boom!”

Jay McInerney, novelist (Bright Lights, Big City; Brightness Falls): Back then, [Tribeca] was precisely what we don’t have in Manhattan anymore, which was a fringe, a no-man’s-land, which, of course, is where subcultures thrive. Just being in that area seemed kind of cool because there wasn’t much there. And just visually you saw the Odeon and you thought, It’s old. It’s new. It’s cutting-edge. It’s retro. Keith is so brilliant at that: making a place look like it has been there forever.

Lorne Michaels: It was the beginning of a new sensibility. Someone who lived the same way we did—and was in the same community we were in—was opening a place, a modest place, in a location no one went to. And like all those things that aren’t supposed to work, it worked perfectly. And it completely satisfied all of our social aspirations.

Linda Stein, real-estate broker, former co-manager of the Ramones: For a time, it was the place. The interesting part is, it was one of the only places that was the place almost any time of day: Sunday brunch or lunch—it wasn’t only after dark. The other thing is, if you ever had jury duty, [the restaurant was close enough to the courts that] you could eat lunch there. It’s the only upside to jury duty. You can have oysters. You can get drunk. And you can get yourself so drunk that they throw you out of jury duty. You get $40 a day from the government for jury duty, but you always spend more at the Odeon.

Michael Mott, former Odeon waiter: There were a lot of fights in this restaurant. It was a very physical restaurant. That first Friday we were open, there was a fistfight. And that was with George Schwarz, the owner of One Fifth.

Amos Poe: George Schwarz came down because, all of a sudden, One Fifth lost its luster. It was such a moment. And George came into Odeon and basically went into a rage.

Lynn Wagenknecht: George had a big table. And obviously the restaurant was chaos. We were doing a hundred dinners and Patrick [Clark, the chef] wasn’t ready to go. So we kept giving everyone in the room more wine. Everyone got inebriated. And George drew some nasty notes on the check and on the receipt.

Michael Mott: There were three globes on the check [that symbolized the Odeon’s lanterns]. And in the central globe, Schwarz wrote a one with a slash and then a five, which was the symbol for his restaurant.

George Schwarz: We visited Odeon for a very simple reason: we were curious to see what it looked like. When we got there, it was half full. At the end of dinner, I drew a simple diagonal line across the inside of the two or three balls on Odeon’s check because I had been shocked and amazed that my wife’s design details had been so closely copied in some of Odeon’s elements. Keith, who is smart and sensitive, saw the check, immediately recognized the allusion, and responded to my message in a high-strung way by asking me to perform an impossible sexual act to myself.

Keith McNally: He was looking for trouble just coming in the door. And he got it. Of course, he fails to mention the black eye he got.

Brian McNally: Keith said, “Look, don’t ever come back here again.” George then threw a punch at Keith. I jumped over the bar and punched him. He went down. There was this huge mêlée in the middle of the restaurant. We got so depressed over that.

Michael Mott: Brian saw George kick Keith in the pants, knock him over against the maître d’ stand, and Brian jumped over the bar to defend his brother. And then they threw George out on the street, and everybody in the restaurant applauded. It was theater, and it was also justified.

Eyebrows were raised in New York’s foodie circles when, one month after the Odeon opened, interimNew York Times restaurant critic Moira Hodgson bestowed a surprising two out of four stars upon the place, raising its profile considerably.

Drew Nieporent, restaurateur (Tribeca Grill, Nobu): The most important thing, for me, was Patrick Clark coming in and giving the place a food credibility and a professionalism. It really defined a certain period of taking great food and putting it in a casual setting and allowing people not to have to get all fussed up [to go out to eat]. It broke down a lot of barriers in that regard.

Mimi Sheraton, former New York Times restaurant critic: The Odeon was the beginning of a new kind of casualness—Armani-silk-shirt or Missoni-sweater casual, not jeans and tank tops.

Paige Powell, former associate publisher of Interview magazine: I used to take my video camera in and record the waiters describing the specials because it was that point in time, remember, that restaurant food got so elaborate. It was like “The Knight’s Tale” they were reciting at your table. It would go on forever.

The Odeon was soon serving as the de facto commissary for the close-knit group of actors and directors—led by Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese—who came to define the New York school of filmmaking. And in their midst were the remnants of another close-knit group that had helped revive the city’s cultural relevance in the mid-70s: the original cast and crew of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

Mitch Glazer, screenwriter (Scrooged, The Recruit): I remember being in there with Dan Aykroyd one night. At another table were Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson [formerly of the Band]. And at one point Danny got up, turned to their table, and said, “Mean Streets. ‘Cripple Creek.’ I respect you gentlemen.”

Tom Schiller, former S.N.L. short-film maker: I can remember that I was quite full of myself, and we all thought we were so special because we worked at Saturday Night Live and they couldn’t harm us. And you could still smoke cigarettes inside. And I had this pretentious horrible habit of smoking clove cigarettes. And so I lit one up once, and suddenly [Atlantic Records co-founder] Ahmet Ertegun throws me a horrible glance, and he says, “I’m trying to eat chicken and all I smell is cloves.” I immediately put it out and felt like an idiot.

Carol Caldwell, writer, girlfriend of the late, unfailingly macabre S.N.L. writer Michael O’Donoghue: I was new to the whole Saturday Night Live set, and it was at the Odeon I had my first real exposure to a lot of them. It was often the four of us [she and O’Donoghue, John Belushi and his wife, Judy], and invariably most everyone gravitated to our table at some point. Michael liked the attention and always wanted to be the one on the banquette looking out. He was quite the dandy and dressed so dapper in a Cole Porter kind of style. He always ordered the calf’s liver with golden raisins sautéed in a sauce of vinegar and veal stock no matter how often we went in a week.

John didn’t care where he sat—all eyes were going to be on him no matter what. He was affecting a black-leather-Harley-Davidson-New-York-punk look back then. It was the first I really got to observe up close what it was like for John to be the object of such continual riveted interest. He was gruff and gracious at the same time. All we had to do was sit there and tout showbiz New York came by. Of course, Michael would have an acerbic capsule report on each of them for my edification. [After each would leave, he’d say something like] “Can’t stay, having dinner with Baryshnikov uptown! Ta-ta!”

Judy Belushi Pisano, John’s widow, co-owner of the Blues Bar: The Odeon introducedus to a few things. Arugula. We used to say, “Arooooogula!” And John loved crème brûlée. That’s where we first had crème brûlée. It got to the point where when we came in, they’d put aside one or two crèmes brûlées because they would run out and he really liked them.

Alan Rebbeck, former Odeon garde-manger: One night, at one in the morning, I went down to the walk-in [refrigerator], and in the walk-in was John Belushi helping himself to the food that had been prepared for the next day. And I said, “Excuse me, what are you doing in here?” And he looked at me, as if, “Who are you? What are you all about?” I immediately ran upstairs and I said to Keith, “John Belushi’s in the walk-in.” He said, “Let him stay there.”

Keith McNally: Few things compared to the number of nights we reopened for John Belushi. Always acting, always high, he was so unfailingly generous in spirit it was just impossible to turn him away, no matter what hour he’d come knocking at the door or what sorry state he was in. Sometimes he’d go into the kitchen and cook himself a hamburger.

Within months of opening, the Odeon had evolved into a big, steamy cassoulet of cross-cultural celebrity. Beneath the dense canopy of cigarette smoke and high-spirited prolixity, strange new combinations of the well known, the highly respected, and the just plain notorious bonded—at times, over equally surreal topics of conversation.

James Signorelli, director of short films and commercial parodies for S.N.L.: It was the end of café society and the beginning of Short-Attention-Span Theater. There was hardly anybody who spent an entire meal at one table. And the thing about Odeon was that, if you go to Nick & Toni’s, in East Hampton, or Mortons [in Los Angeles], it’s very unlikely that you would be comfortable going over to sit down with Johnny Depp. You might go over and say a quick “Hi”—you’d want to show the room that you could do it. But there was a genuine conviviality and community that went on at Odeon. People freely passed from place to place and freely exchanged friends and lovers and other things.

Dirk Wittenborn, novelist, former S.N.L. writer: Odeon was a place where you’d see David Hockney, John Belushi, a girl that was just on the cover of French Vogue, a male hustler, and Morgan Entrekin [then a book editor, currently the president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic].

Janice Dickinson, model, author (No Lifeguard on Duty): I was there every night with John Belushi and Dirk Wittenborn and Diane von Furstenberg. Rick James. I was there with everybody. I remember hanging out with John Belushi right by the—there was an old telephone booth downstairs. We used to sit in there and we’d get high. We’d set up shop in the phone booth. We called it “the Ode.” Let’s hit the Ode, or let’s go hang in the phone booth. That was code for the Ode.

Michael Mott: There was a period when Cher would come in, and she was having work done. She had braces and she had her hair bleached blond. And she had to eat puréed food because she’d had so much work done on her mouth. And one of the waiters got in big trouble because he said, “Oh, we’ll be happy to do it for you, but you should call ahead of time so that we can have it prepared for you.”

Geraldine Bartlett, former Odeon waitress: After Robert De Niro made Raging Bull, he’d gotten really, really fat. [De Niro gained weight for the role.] He would come in with his girlfriend at the time, Toukie Smith [a model and actress]. He was hardly eating, and she was always goofing on him. She’d make fun of what he’d order—salad or something. She’d say, “Oh boy, we’re really going to eat tonight.”

Gordon Elliott, television producer, TV personality: I met a bloke there who apparently came from one of the biggest department-store dynasties in America. He said his name was Peter. But being from Australia, when he referred to the family store, I thought he was talking about a grocery shop on the corner. I didn’t realize he was talking about millions of dollars in real estate. Anyway, it was very late on a Saturday night, because Peter’s friend had gone out and gotten the early edition of the Sunday New York Times and was reading it at the table. Peter decided that reading the newspaper at the table during dinner was bad manners, and as he was talking to me, he leaned over with his cigarette lighter and lit the bottom of the Times. His friend was so drunk he didn’t notice until there was a good flame coming up the back of his paper.

Now, this is why I love the Odeon. No one in the restaurant and no one on the staff blinked. The guy threw the paper on the floor—it was fully aflame by then—and jumped on it. He threw one of those big bottles of water all over the floor. And the staff just came in very quietly, cleaned it up, got him a new napkin, and the whole evening continued as if nothing had happened. To me, it defined New York sophistication.

Geraldine Bartlett: One night, Warren Beatty was in with a group of people. After my shift I was outside flagging down a cab when this man approached me. He said, “My friend and I have been watching you. And we’d like you to be in our movie.” I said, “Well, call my agent.” He said, “No, really, I’m a filmmaker. I made Fingers.” He said he was James Toback, but I’d never heard of him. I thought it was a porno film. I got in the cab. There’s a knock on the window. It’s Warren Beatty. He says, “What are you doing? Let us take you in a limousine.” By this time another waitress had gotten in the cab with me. I looked at her and said, “Come on.” [In the limo,] Warren had this really drunk woman sitting on his lap. She kept looking at me and saying to Warren, “What would you rate her between a 1 and a 10?” They wanted us to come to the hotel or something, and I said, “I am so tired. I just want to go home.” He was very cool. I think he was sort of surprised that we didn’t want to come with him. We got to my apartment, and he said, “What was your name?” I told him, and he said, “You know what, Geraldine, we make a lot of choices in life, and tonight I think you made the right one.”

Michael Mott: I was closing. It was like two o’clock in the morning. Tina Turner comes in, and she had that hair. I was waiting on Table 24. And Table 24 says, “That woman over there looks very familiar. Was she in Cats?”

Another night, Elizabeth Taylor was at Table 21 with Carl Bernstein. She had on her rock, and she was wearing a white starched man’s shirt and a pair of blue jeans. And this little girl from Table 50 comes over and she says, “Miss Taylor, I just want to tell you how much I appreciate your work.” And Liz said, “Thank you so much. Would you like to sit down?” And then she sat down—this little girl about eight or nine years old—and they talked for like 15, 20 minutes. I didn’t even realize it at the time, but it was Drew Barrymore. Then Carl and Liz got up from the table. It was a hot summer night, and they just walked up West Broadway with no limo, no guards, or anything. And she was wearing a rock as big as my knuckle. There was always something amazing happening. It was like living a movie.

Some amazing things were happening in the art world as well. On September 27, 1980, just a few weeks before Odeon opened its doors, The New York Times reported that the Whitney Museum had raised $1 million to buy Jasper Johns’s 1958 paintingThree Flags from a family in Connecticut who’d paid $900 for it in 1959. The amount paid by the Whitney was believed to be the largest ever for the work of a living artist. As millions more dollars began coursing through a revived art world, a new generation of art stars was minted, along with a new generation of insurgent gallery owners, many based in SoHo. Among the vanguard were painters Julian Schnabel, Ross Bleckner, David Salle, Robert Longo, and David Sultan, graffiti artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and dealers Mary Boone, Larry Gagosian, and Tony Shafrazi. For business and pleasure, these up-and-comers made the Odeon their hangout. And on those occasions when they were joined by their forebears—Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, and, inevitably, Andy Warhol—the Odeon could feel like the center of the art universe.

Ross Bleckner: You know what? It was the first restaurant in New York where I could actually get a reservation quickly. I like restaurants where I get reservations.

__Michael Mott:__Andy [Warhol] was here all the time. He used to come in with his entourage. Paige Powell used to do the talking for him because Andy wouldn’t talk. She’d say: “Andy will have this,” and “Andy will have that.” And Andy would just kind of sit there and stare.

__Paige Powell:__Robert Longo used to go there a lot. And he would kind of come in with his dark glasses, all in black. His table was usually way in the back, catty-corner to the entrance. And when he would walk by, Andy would go, “There goes Robert Longoooooo.” But Robert would never say “Hi” to us.

The great thing about the Odeon was you could go there all the time. Andy and I would meet Keith Haring there for lunch at, like, one o’clock on a Sunday, and Keith would come in with all these kids he had been hanging out with for the last two days at the Paradise Garage [a gay disco downtown], just to eat something finally. It was like they were coming out to get back into reality.

__Mary Boone, art dealer:__Keith [McNally] yelled at me because, at my birthday party, Julian [Schnabel] and I think it was Jeff Koons or maybe Jean-Michel [Basquiat] were throwing toilet-paper wet balls. You know how if you take a roll of toilet paper and put it into the toilet, it absorbs all the water and it becomes like a water balloon? They were throwing them at each other at my birthday party. [Schnabel denies this.] And Keith kicked us out before we got to have birthday cake.

__Joe Helman, gallery owner:__I’ve been in art bars before. This was something else. This was at the time of postmodernism. It wasn’t the same deep art passions. Artists were into success and taking over the restaurant and giving big parties. It wasn’t the Cedar Bar. It was much tonier than that. Yes, [arguments about art] took place and feelings ran very high. But you didn’t go there to do that the way you went to the Cedar Bar. Keith had these amazingly beautiful waitresses.

Richard Serra, sculptor: Look, if you want to get it straight, Max’s Kansas City is where the art ideology was worked out, in the 60s. It wasn’t the Odeon. The Odeon was a place where celebrities from uptown wanted to slum with artists downtown.

__Tom Wolfe, novelist, journalist:__I always thought of the Odeon as SoHo’s Cotton Club. The Cotton Club was a place where you could go and feel like you experienced the Harlem Renaissance. You couldn’t go much anywhere else, but you could go to the Cotton Club and say, “Hey, yeah, I was part of the scene.” It was the same thing at the Odeon. At that time, there weren’t all these places in SoHo. SoHo was in the papers—people were all talking about the new art world—but there was only one place the outlander like myself could go, and that was the Odeon. It was full of museum administrators and business types from uptown. At first, of course, it was full of people like Donald Sultan, Ross Bleckner, and so on. But pretty soon, everyone who wanted to be where things were happening, as the phrase goes, was coming in. I would see more people from Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, at the Odeon than I ever did anywhere else the whole time I was in New York. You got your toe in the water and you saw that you were where things were happening. And then you went home.

If the Odeon didn’t seethe with quite the same belligerent passions as the old Cedar Bar, where New York’s Abstract Expressionists had boozed and brawled in the 50s, the restaurant still hosted its share of badly behaving artists. Perhaps the most memorably disruptive was Richard Serra, whose combative personality was reflected in the imposing, rust-covered, monolithic sculptures that became his forte.

__Keith McNally:__Richard Serra was a pit bull in blue overalls. On the other hand, I think Serra was one of the very few true artists who ate or drank at the Odeon.

__Brian McNally:__Keith would ban Richard Serra, and then I would let him back in. That’s how it worked. Richard Serra would call: “Oh, there was a misunderstanding.” “O.K., come back.”

__Richard Serra:__O.K., look. Possibly I was thrown out of the Odeon once in my life. But so what?

A number of Odeon regulars haven’t forgotten the confrontation between Serra and the actress Brooke Hayward after the artist insulted her dinner companion, Irving Blum, co-owner of the Blum Helman Gallery, which represented Serra. According to the sculptor, he became angry because “Blum was bragging to me how he had screwed over an artist—a mentor—in a deal, and it didn’t sit very well with me.” Blum wouldn’t return calls for this article, and what happened next is a matter of some dispute—especially from Hayward’s perspective—but several witnesses say the actress sprang to Blum’s defense by taking a swipe at Serra.

__Brooke Hayward:__Serra came up to the table. He’s very intelligent and very articulate. He got insulting to Irving. I don’t remember precisely what he said, but it was loud and it was unattractive. And I said, “Richard, you’re talking about one of my best friends.” He was on a rampage that night.

__Richard Serra:__I remember insulting Irving. And I remember her being outraged that I insulted Irving. And she may have thrown a punch at me, and I may have just put my arms up and blocked it. That’s the total story of it.

__Joe Helman:__She took a swipe at him, and he stopped her wrist. He was blocking the blow. She swung her right. He put up his left.

Brooke Hayward: To slap him I would have had to have stood up. How could I slap him from a seated position? It doesn’t sound like me, because I’ve never slapped anybody, not even a child.

__Joe Helman:__There was an altercation and it was very emotionally charged. I think Richard got abusive later, after we left. I think he was at the bar picking fights and was asked to leave.

__Richard Serra:__That’s not true. I wasn’t at the bar. The police came, the bartender just looked at me and pointed, and I walked out. It wasn’t like someone came up and manhandled me.

Among the most charismatic—and enigmatic—of the downtown artists was Jean-Michel Basquiat, protégé of Warhol’s, onetime boyfriend of Madonna’s, and conflicted New York Times Magazine cover boy. The dreadlocked Basquiat found comfort at the Odeon, both on and off the menu. He dated at least one of the restaurant’s waitresses, but often could be seen dining by himself.

__Michael Mott:__He was this kid who all of a sudden was making millions of dollars, and he would just throw it at us. We called him Mumbles because we could never understand anything he’d say.

__Joe Helman:__One night, my wife, Ursula, [painter] Bryan Hunt, and I are having dinner, and Basquiat joins us. It’s summertime. Bryan’s got a brand-new white linen jacket on. And we ordered dessert: strawberries. They used to serve plain strawberries, maybe with a little whipped cream on them or something like that. And Basquiat picks up the strawberry and grinds it into the lapel of Bryan’s new white linen jacket. Anyway, we went quiet. I thought Bryan was going to stand up and they were going to go at it. But Bryan started laughing. He said, “Hey, that looks pretty good.” Basquiat was probably jealous of Bryan’s success—Bryan, at that moment, was probably the hottest thing that there was. But I think it was just aesthetics: Bryan had this white jacket on and Basquiat could see a red spot on it. I don’t think it was anything more than that. It turned out to be funny. It could have gone the other way.

__Donald Sultan, painter:__When Basquiat and Warhol did their show together, in 1985—they worked on each other’s canvases at Tony Shafrazi’s gallery—they came down to the Odeon, and I was reading the New York Times review of the show. It was a terrible review. [Basquiat was accused of succumbing “to the forces that would make him an art world mascot.”] At one point, I left the table to get something. And when I got up, Jean-Michel went over and tore the review out of my newspaper and went back to his table with it so I wouldn’t be able to finish it.

Paige Powell: I went there a lot with Jean-Michel and with Andy. Part of the reason was that Interview magazine had credit with the Odeon [in trade for advertising], so we’d do a lot of entertaining there. And if Jean-Michel started ordering the most expensive wines on the menu, then Andy would pay for the food and go, “Let Jean-Michel get that wine.” Andy didn’t drink that much and [the bottles Basquiat ordered] were hundreds of dollars—really expensive.

The Odeon did have quite a smart wine list, but the 80s were more about cocaine than Côtes du Rhône. The restaurant’s downstairs bathrooms were the primary destinations for both faux-discreet consumption of the drug and any carnal behavior that might result, while upstairs, one waiter remembers, “all those Wall Street guys would get so high they’d be screaming at the bar when they talked.”

Danny Fields, writer, former co-manager of the Ramones: I remember all the surfaces for coke sniffing in the men’s room. I could tell you every one of them. And everybody was running up and down the stairs with cocaine. There was a line to go in—not to pee, but to snoot—so that was nice about it. I’m sure that nothing of the sort happens there anymore. But it was a good place to do coke. First of all, you traveled so far to get there, you needed a little energizing.

__Donald Sultan:__There was also a little service room under the stairs that had a little door. People would sneak in there to do coke. But in those days you didn’t really have to hide so much. People would do it at the tables.

__Geraldine Bartlett:__You would go into the kitchen and tell Patrick, “Hold the food.” Nouvelle cuisine, I always felt, was born out of the cocaine 80s.

__Dirk Wittenborn:__There was more food not eaten and more dinners not completed. You’d just order to have it in front of you.

Though the bacchanal taking place behind the Odeon’s wooden venetian blinds at times threatened to reel out of control, the restaurant’s three active partners deftly maintained a balance between order and euphoria with the help of a mostly close-knit staff.

__Joe Helman:__Keith was a brilliant steely Dan. He knew where he was going all the time. Keith was always in control of Keith, and Keith was always in control of the situation.

__Geraldine Bartlett:__One night, Keith was the maître d’ and [high-strung poet and painter] Rene Ricard came up to him in hysterics and was screaming at him. And Keith whirled around and said, “Rene, take your seat!”—like a schoolmaster. And Rene turned around and walked to his seat. It was a scene out of an English boys’ school or something.

__Laila Nabulsi, former S.N.L. producer:__Brian had this great way about him. I don’t even know if I was really sure he owned the place. He always seemed like he was the guy behind the bar who let us get away with shit and the real owners were somewhere else and they didn’t know what we were doing.

In 1982 the Odeon’s troika of partners became a duo, when Brian departed the restaurant to move to Paris with his new wife. The McNally brothers would never work together again, and by 1984, after Brian, having returned to the States, opened his first solo project, Indochine, they would not even be on speaking terms. Except for a brief public rapprochement in the mid-1990s, the brothers remain at odds to this day.

__Keith McNally:__It’s an understatement to say Brian and I didn’t get along well at the Odeon. Unfortunately, we had very different ways of working, and matters certainly weren’t helped by me being more uptight in running the place than I should have been. I was the one sort of in charge, though—or, rather, ultimately responsible for the place, so perhaps it’s slightly understandable.

The other thing to remember is that when any group of people come together and create something even marginally successful, it’s often due to the differences, not the similarities, in their characters. But these differences then go on to create huge strains within, and this is kind of what happened to us. At least that’s my excuse. But who knows? Maybe if Brian and I had gotten along like a house on fire the Odeon would’ve lasted about four hours.

__Brian McNally:__We’ve always had altercations. It’s like the fault line that runs through the family. It’s just which side you’re on when it happens.

On March 5, 1982, John Belushi died of an overdose in Los Angeles. “In many ways, he was my favorite customer,” says Keith, who adds that the Odeon never again stayed open quite so late. For many of the Odeon’s original regulars, Belushi’s death marked the end of the restaurant’s most incandescent era. For others, the curtain falls at the 1983 opening of Café Luxembourg, or the 1984 debut of Indochine. Still, the party at the Odeon continued apace, and around the same time that Brian McNally went into business on his own, a whole new audience discovered the Odeon when they cracked a novel called Bright Lights, Big City, by a young writer named Jay McInerney.

__Jay McInerney:__When I published Bright Lights, the Random House lawyer called me up and said, “This place called the Odeon isn’t an actual establishment, is it?” And I said, “Oh yeah, actually it is.” And he just lost his shit. He said, “You can’t allege that there’s drug use taking place in the bathroom. They’ll sue us.” I said, “Nah, I don’t really think so.” And right about that time the artwork came back for the cover [which depicted the Odeon with the World Trade Center towers in the background]. So, Gary Fisketjon, my editor, suggested that I just talk to them. So, I made an appointment to see Keith McNally, and I explained the situation to him, and I showed him the artwork, and he said, “Great. No problem.”

__Keith McNally:__Jay’s publisher or his agent or he himself came to see me at one point and said, “Oh, we’ve got this book. We want to use a picture of the Odeon.” And he made some terrible jokes that were very unfunny. And so I just thought he was talentless. I looked at it, I read a little bit, and I didn’t think much of it. I thought, This will never see the light of day. And so I didn’t charge them anything for the [use of the Odeon’s image] and all that. And then I remember walking up Fifth Avenue and passing Doubleday [one of the grand pre-Amazon bookstores that dotted the Avenue] and doing a double take and seeing the whole window plastered with pictures of the Odeon on the cover.

__Jay McInerney:__I like to joke with Keith and Lynn that I must have put at least one of their kids through school by now. The McInerney scholarship.

As the decade wore on, a lot of the “froth”— Joe Helman’s word—began to disappear from the scene that had coalesced around the Odeon. The restaurant’s staff was every bit as ravaged by aids as was the rest of New York, and then there was the 1987 stock-market crash, which put a lid on the city’s free-spending economy. That same year Andy Warhol died from complications following gallbladder surgery. Michael Mott remembers a “devastated” Jean-Michel Basquiat coming into the Odeon alone after the news broke. “He just said ‘Andy’ and lay his head down on a table, knocking drinks over. Everything went flying.” The following year, Basquiat would himself succumb to a drug overdose. As the 80s became the 90s, the newer McNally restaurants, along with other hot spots such as Barocco, Café Tabac, and Rex, siphoned off the restaurant’s heat. “There was a moment when the Odeon was singular, and then it wasn’t,” Helman says.

*But the Odeon was destined for an even more rarefied achievement: the trendsetting restaurant that outlives many of its successors and evolves into a classic. Wagenknecht alone would navigate the Odeon past the rocky shoals of her divorce, the economic doldrums of the early 90s (which were followed by the restaurant’s most profitable period to date), and the devastation of the attack on the World Trade Center, eight blocks south. (Like many restaurants in the neighborhood, the Odeon gave free meals to Ground Zero workers.)

The Odeon has now settled into comfortable middle age as a well-attended neighborhood local. “I wouldn’t want the restaurant to be what it was between 1980 and 1985 now,” Wagenknecht says. “I’ve changed, the customers have changed, and the restaurant has to change to continue to move forward.”*

But every so often a face in the crowd knocks loose a few memories of long nights spent beneath a certain neon sign …

__Geraldine Bartlett:__People on the street sometimes look at me like “Did we sleep together?” No, I was a waiter at the Odeon.